EUROPE – The Ibersnacks Group, a manufacturer of chips and snacks which provides these products for the white brand of Mercadona, Hacendado, has reached an agreement to join the French manufacturer Europe Snacks Kolak.

According to the company, this acquisition will form a new group business with a joint turnover of US$407.6 million.

According to the last accounts of Ibersnacks deposited in the Mercantile Registry, and corresponding to the year 2016, the company invoiced that year close to US$87.34 million, and obtained a benefit close to US$3.4 million, Mercadona being its main client.

The owner of Ibersnacks, Félix Eguía, will be a shareholder of the resulting company as well as a director, and will also maintain his executive functions in Ibersnacks in Spain.

The partnership between the two forms a business group that will have eight manufacturing plants, both of Ibersnacks in Spain, plus four in France and two in the United Kingdom.

Its industrial capacity will exceed 150,000 tons of chips and snacks made exclusively for third parties, as both companies have indicated.

“Mercadona will continue to be the main client of the new project, as both Ibersnacks and European Snacks Kolak will continue to be specialist suppliers of the company in that category.”

The 400 employees of Ibersnacks will also become part of the new group.

Felix Eguía has explained through a statement that “the alliance reached makes Ibersnacks a key piece of a much more ambitious project and that will allow all of us who are part of it not only to reach the goals before but to take on new ones; investor and business challenges.”

In 2016, Europe Snacks carried out a similar operation with the British manufacturer Kolak Snack Foods, also specialized in snacks and chips for private labels.